Dust in Our Eyes

Meanwhile, some of the most respected political pundits I know in this country have adopted as an article of faith that Putinist Russia is an “ordinary authoritarian regime.”

Why have they adopted this article of faith? Did the Archangel Gabriel appear to them in a dream and tell them the good news?

No. They’ve persuaded themselves this is the case so they don’t have to think about things such as why their country’s operatives tried to cause permanent hearing damage to US diplomats at the US embassy in Havana; why their country has invaded and occupied parts of Ukraine; why an unidentified agent of their country’s security forces went to the grassroots memorial to Boris Nemtsov in downtown Moscow the other day and broke the nose of the activist standing vigil there, thus eventually killing him; why their country’s armed forces have aided the bloody dictator Bashar Assad in crushing the massive popular rebellion against his tyrannical regime, a war that has killed, according to some estimates, at least half a million people, not to mention the millions of people it has forced to leave the country; why the country’s most famous theater director, Kirill Serebrennikov, has been arrested on manifestly absurd trumped-up charges; why their country has tried, valiantly it has to be said, to mess with elections in several other countries, including the US; and so on.

My catalogue of ships could have been a hundred times longer. It could have spanned as many of the past eighteen years as I would have liked or been limited to the last week or two. But what’s the point? Do all or any of these behaviors strike you as typical of an “ordinary authoritarian regime”?

And so, some of Russia’s hepcat political pundits have adopted this new article of faith so that, no matter what new hellish stupidity the Putin regime commits at home or abroad today or tomorrow (it does something of the sort almost literally every day; sometimes, ten times a day) they can remark dryly to their concerned foreign colleagues, “Don’t look so worried. It’s just an ordinary authoritarian regime.” TRR